Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

I forgot to mention yesterday why I sometimes resort to that unpopular method of lecturing in my Trigonometric Applications class last Thursday: I was either relatively tired or not in a mood to start lecturing, so that I needed extra time to compose myself before I “faced” the class, especially if I were handling two or three sessions in a row.

I admit that I also used this tactic a lot during my first few years of teaching if it was the first time that I taught an unfamiliar subject. I also used this in computer programming class (not so unfamiliar) when I wanted to intimidate the students by writing several dozens of lines of code on the board without looking at any reference notes, and have the commands virtually error free* if they tried it.

Immediately after my Trig App class, the practical exam for mechanics lab started. Good thing that only one student signed for the first three ten minutes slot, and he was late at that, then wanted to change his schedule to a later one so that he could see how his classmates fared before he took the exam.

That gave me time to pass by the quadrangle and sample the marketing fare (mostly food) some of my former (and current) students sold for their (no surprise) marketing class.

A handful of students only signed up for the practical exam schedule on that day. It’s a good thing some other students who arrived early, even though they were scheduled for the second hour, took the test early, so that there were enough slots for the latecomers, although I still stayed in the lab until almost 5pm, even though our original schedule was only up to 420pm.

By some strange twist of fate, no one picked Experiment Number 6, Conservation of Mechanical Energy. Only one had to explain Projectile Motion, and that was when he asked me to draw the number for him.

Just like what David and I did last March (or April, I’m too lazy to check right now), we gave them the scores immediately after the exam, when the students said they had nothing more to say about the experiment.

No one got below ten points, even though I started at seven. Three of those who showed up last (including two who were repeating the subject from David’s class before) just talked about what they knew minimally instead of guessing. That gave them scores between ten and fourteen.

It was almost seven hours since my first class of the day that I returned to the faculty room, having only passed by a few minutes in between each class. But at that point it was all over but the exams.

Except for the last Mathematical Methods lecture the next day. For this we had another review which was the same questions as in the comprehensive exam.

But I’ll have to talk about that tomorrow. For now, class dismissed.

*During the rare times that I did make a mistake in the programming instructions, which was only on the more advanced lessons, I would make it into a game where I would (usually) be the one to tell them there was an error and whoever could find it would get a bonus for that session.